282 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE. 



HERBERT SPENCER. 



The world loses one of its few great 

 men in the death of Herbert Spencer. 

 Thirty years ago there lived and 

 worked in Great Britain a notable 

 group of leaders — ^Darwin, Hiixley, 

 Browning, Tennyson, Carlyle, Ruskin, 

 Thackeray, Gladstone and many more. 

 One by one they have died, each time 

 leaving an empty space that remains 

 unfilled. We have still Kelvin, Watts, 

 Swinburne and Mereditli, but the 

 voices of the Victorian era are now 

 nearly silent. It is perhaps needful 

 to go back to the Elizabethan age for a 

 period of parallel efHorescence ; and it 

 may be that such will not again recur 

 even after three hundred years. 



Spencer believed in universal evolu- 

 tion rather than in miracles wrought 

 by the individual; and it is certainly 

 true that his own work was the result 

 rather than the cause of certain lead- 

 ing tendencies of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury. Evolution and the conservation 

 of energy are the great legacy handed 

 on to the twentieth century, no longer 

 speculations of the philosophers, but 

 part of the real life of every one. 

 Spencer more completely and more per- 

 fectly than any other represented these 

 truths and made them our common 

 heritage. In the preface to the fourth 

 edition of the ' First Principles,' he 

 explains that the doctrine of evolution 

 was maintained by him two or even four 

 years before the publication of the 

 ' Origin of Species.' As a matter of 

 fact the idea of world evolution goes 

 back almost to the beginning of 

 thought; it is clearly stated for in- 

 organic matter and living things by the 

 Greek philosophers and again by Kant, 

 Laplace, Goethe and Lamarck. It is 

 a question whether eA^en Darwin's * nat- 



ural selection,' which does not after all 

 play a leading part in Spencer's phi- 

 losophy, can not be found in Aristotle. 

 Evolution was clearly ' in the air ' in 

 the middle decades of the nineteenth 

 century. Thus before Darwin or 

 Spencer, Tennyson wrote and printed 

 the line verses: 

 'So careful of the type?' but no. 



From scarped cliff and quarried 



stone - 

 Slie cries, ' A thousand types are 



gone: 

 I care for nothing, ail shall go.' 

 * ***** 



The solid earth whereon we tread 

 In tracts of fluent heat began, 



And grew to seeming random forms, 

 The seeming prey of cyclic storms, 

 Till at the last arose the man. 



Of these ideas Spencer became the 

 leading representative, his bold for- 

 mulas appealing directly to the people 

 to an extent that could not be expected 

 of Darwin's patient investigations. 

 The methods of the two men are com- 

 pared in a letter from Darwin to John 

 Eiske : 



I find that my mind is so fixed by 

 the inductive method that I can not 

 appreciate deductive reasoning: I 

 must begin with a good body of facts 

 and not from a principle (in w^hich I 

 always suspect some fallacy) and 

 then as much deduction as you please. 

 This may be very narrow-minded; 

 but the result is that such parts of 

 H. Spencer as I have read with care 

 impress my mind with the idea of 

 his inexhaustible wealth of sugges- 

 tion, but never convince me. 



If others were as frank as Darwin, 

 many would say with him : " With the 

 exception of special points I did not 

 even understand H. Spencer's general 

 doctrine; for his style is too hard work 

 for me." But Spencer appealed to the 

 emotions as well as to the intellect. 



